David C. Chao, ThM ’11, PhD ’19, is director of the Center for Asian American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary. He teaches courses on Asian American theology and organizes academic programming in Asian American theology and ministry. His research and writing focus on Asian American theology, the uses of Christian doctrine for liberation, the convergence and divergence of Protestant and Catholic dogmatics, and the theology of Karl Barth. His first book, titled Concursus and Concept Use in Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Providence, is under contract with Routledge. He is grant co-author and project editor for the translation grant awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to the Karl Barth Translator’s Seminar. He is co-leader of a Henry Luce grant project titled “Religiously-Inspired Asian American Coalitional Justice Work” and principal investigator of a Louisville Institute-funded project titled “Stories of Faith, Resilience, and Politics: First-Generation East Asian American Christians.”

Chao is a graduate of Yale University (BA), Regent College (MDiv), and Princeton Theological Seminary (ThM, PhD). He is a member of the American Academy of Religion and the Association for Asian American Studies. Chao has a wide range of pastoral experience with Chinese American, Korean American, and Pan-Asian churches and ministries and is an active member of the Presbyterian Church (USA).  His publications include, Special issue of Theology Today (January 2023, “Lived Theology in Asian America: Race, Justice, and Politics in Transpacific Context”) and Asian American Christian Theology: An Introduction and New Perspectives (under contract with Wiley-Blackwell).